Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:10:29] S0: Music to my ears, Dan, you're making a lot of very happy listeners here. I've been saying this for a long time too. It's just like the skills you need to build are the things, like the building now is done for you. What do you need to be good at? Figuring out what to build, figuring out if it's great, figuring out what problems to solve. So I love that you're actually seeing this come to fruition. [01:10:48] S1: I really believe it. [01:10:50] S0: This could be the highest rated podcast episode of my whole podcast. Everyone's going to be like- [01:10:50] S1: I love it. [01:10:50] S0: ... hell yeah. [01:10:55] S1: It's going to be okay. SaaS is back, PMs are back. [01:10:58] S0: This is the most contrarian episode I've ever done. Oh my God.
01:10:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:10:58] S0: This is the most contrarian episode I've ever done. Oh my God. [01:11:06] S1: Okay. So the other people that I think are going to be super, super power people, and again, this is because we see this internally, is full stack designers. If you're a designer and you're in these tools all the time, you're so used to, okay, I make this beautiful interaction and the engineer just doesn't want to do it or it doesn't happen the way I think it should happen or there's all this stuff and I see so many designers for us internally or externally where they now feel so empowered to go build stuff because they're like, "I have all these ideas to make things look amazing and these interesting interactions." And that's the exact thing that it's really hard to do with vibe coding because it just all looks the same. So it all looks like Slap and they can make stuff that looks so different and now they can actually build it. And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just making pull requests. They don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they just make pull requests and- ... Need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it. I think that's incredible for the way that companies work, but it's also there's a huge opportunity for those people to become entrepreneurs and start their own thing because they can make stuff now. And I think designers are such creative people, and I think AI is a super tool for anyone like that.
01:12:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:12:23] S0: I so agree. Even though there's cloud design, there's all these AI designing tools, once you see it, you're like, "That's definitely cloud design." The creativity to your point, it just feels like it's going to be more and more valuable to stand out from all the slop that people are shipping and launching constantly. So I completely agree. It's interesting that designer roles, I do research on the job market and interestingly, designer roles have not grown in a while. So I'm waiting to see if that becomes a big trend. Just like we need more designers. [01:12:55] S1: That is really interesting. We'll see. [01:12:58] S0: We'll see. We'll see. That might be a way to predict this is are people hiring more designers? I don't know. [01:13:02] S1: That is interesting. [01:13:04] S0: Yeah. All right. So PM Designer thriving, killing-
01:13:09 · Dan Shipper
[01:13:09] S1: PM Designer thriving. I also just think generally the AI job apocalypse is not really a thing. Absolutely we see companies starting to reorganize and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think to be honest, a lot of the reorganization, you can say it's AI, but it's like we overhired and the company's not doing as well and all that kind of ... It was coming and this is a good excuse. But the mass unemployment thing I think that some AI CEOs are talking about, I think that's not going to happen. The pattern that I see so far, and again, I don't have a total crystal ball, but I do feel like we've seen enough of the new model drops to have some sense of how this is going is that what a new model drop does or what models do in general is they make yesterday's human competence cheap. So what I mean by that is they ingest all this data of what has happened already and they make it really cheap to deploy that in whatever situation you want as your own. And what happens then is this is a new power that everyone has, so it gets adopted super rapidly and suddenly that stuff is everywhere. It's suddenly anyone can make a landing page. There's new landing pages everywhere. Suddenly everyone can write. There's slop tweets everywhere. But what's interesting is because it's all coming from these models and everyone's using basically the same models, it all looks the same if you use it in the most default basic way. And so it becomes commoditized. It's not valuable anymore. And what humans do is we sort of go in there, and we're like, "Yeah," we have all this frozen human competence from yesterday. How do I use this to make something new and interesting? And I really think that structurally because of the way the models work, because of the financial incentives of model companies to make them compliant and aligned, structurally they're always going to be trailing behind those people who are taking the models and using them to make new expertise or make new things that haven't been done that way before for their very, very particular situation. And that stuff is going to get incorporated into the models, but again, it will create room for people to push further ahead. And I think that you see this in a small way in pretty much all the jobs is engineers. Suddenly everyone's an engineer, but that doesn't mean we fire the engineers.
01:15:42 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
There's way more demand for engineers because you need the engineers to figure out, okay, this is all slop. How should this actually go in our code base? And I think that's something that the benchmarks rising doesn't really capture and it feels like a thing that will take a long time to change. [01:16:02] S0: People may be hearing in this prediction here of just, okay, the job apocalypse not going to, people are not going to be all fired. There's going to be human jobs remaining for quite a while. It may be almost too comforting because you probably have to change the way you operate to still have a job in the future. Do you have any sense of just like, here's what you need to do to not be one of these layoffs? [01:16:25] S1: Yes. And I think that is actually super important. The only thing you need to do is ride the models and that means use them for whatever it is that you do. We've talked about how Codex and Cowork are becoming the sort of standard operating system for work. If you're just doing that and when new models come out, you're trying them and figuring out, okay, now there are new powers. How can I use them? Instead of just being like, "I'm going to try to ignore it because it makes me afraid." Which I think is honestly, it's rational. It's a reasonable response. And also if you ride on top of them, they extend your powers in a way that doesn't leave you behind. You're part of the future and part of the way work happens. And I think that we're going to need people doing that for a very, very long time.
01:16:25 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:16:25] S1: Yes. And I think that is actually super important. The only thing you need to do is ride the models and that means use them for whatever it is that you do. We've talked about how Codex and Cowork are becoming the sort of standard operating system for work. If you're just doing that and when new models come out, you're trying them and figuring out, okay, now there are new powers. How can I use them? Instead of just being like, "I'm going to try to ignore it because it makes me afraid." Which I think is honestly, it's rational. It's a reasonable response. And also if you ride on top of them, they extend your powers in a way that doesn't leave you behind. You're part of the future and part of the way work happens. And I think that we're going to need people doing that for a very, very long time. [01:17:16] S0: I like this term, ride the model. So what's like say a new model comes out, what do you think someone say working at, I don't know, Salesforce? Say a PM at Salesforce, what should they do to ride the model?